


The New Boy

by afrai



Category: Psmith - Wodehouse
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-28
Updated: 2009-04-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 01:35:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrai/pseuds/afrai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had not even been allowed to keep his morningstar -- Mike Jackson, whose mastery of the instrument had been admired by all at Wrykyn! Here at beastly Sedleigh they would not even know what a morningstar was, probably.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Boy

There was no sign of the promised house master, though Mike had been sitting in his study for half an hour. For Mike, brooding on the lost splendours of Wrykyn, this fresh indignity rendered everything even more intolerable. Outwood's study was perfectly inoffensive, lined with bookshelves and comfortably if shabbily furnished in the usual way, but Mike noted every dust mote and crumpled paper with uncharacteristic disapproval, until he had worked himself up into an ecstasy of bad temper.

When the door swung open, he shot it a glare that would have made a basilisk step back sheepishly and apologise for interrupting him. The boy who entered, however, merely reached into his waistcoat and raised an eyeglass on a cord to his eye.

"Hark!" he murmured. "A new voice fell dulcet upon the air. Who are you?"

Mike had been doing a good job of glaring so far and he saw no reason to stop.

"What's it to you?" he said.

"I like to take an interest in our new recruits," said the boy. He made himself at home in a chair opposite Mike, grimacing slightly when he had settled.

"A good heart, Comrade Outwood," he said, "a noble mind, a fine, manly countenance, I grant you -- but what price all this if he lacks the strength of arm occasionally to ply the duster? It is a question that troubles my peace; one never knows when one may be forced to sit in one of his armchairs. Perhaps he could be persuaded to grow lettuces in here, and turn his unfortunate habits to good.

"My name is Smith," said the boy. "Spelt with a P: compare pterodactyl, psoriasis, Psyche. Now where have you sprung from, and what on earth could have possessed you to spring to this hole?"

In Mike's current condition, with hate for his new circumstances sticking out all over him, he could not help but be gratified by this speech. He warmed to the chap. An honest fellow -- saw things as they were, in all their ugliness.

"I was at Wrykyn," he said. "Jackson's the name. Why are you here if you bar the place so much?"

"Necessity is a cruel master," said Psmith poetically but uninformatively. "Wrykyn, is it? Did barbary not suit your tastes?"

The truth was precisely the opposite. Mike had loved being a barbarian. His father and brothers had all been barbarians, each excelling in their respective ways, and Mike had hoped to distinguish himself in the line as well. He had been nearly at the peak of his clubbing when he was cruelly snatched away from that life. He had not even been allowed to keep his morningstar -- Mike Jackson, whose mastery of the instrument had been admired by all at Wrykyn! Here at beastly Sedleigh they would not even know what a morningstar was, probably.

"Suit me! I should jolly well think it did," said Mike. "Here I won't get to do a lick of it, I suppose." He cast a bitter glance at the staff lying under his chair. Psmith observed this.

"I see all," he said. "It is the old story. A thoughtless word -- boyish fisticuffs -- a careless fireball or lightning storm the result -- and they tore you from all you held dear. Magic run in the family?"

Mike had thought he would never tell anyone what had happened that last morning at Wrykyn. His eyebrows had grown back over the summer, but he still felt the tingle of power in his fingers. He remembered that moment as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday: the flames bursting from his fingertips, surprising him as much as anyone else; the electric silence that followed. It was Psmith's nonchalance as much as anything else, as if latent magical talent were a perfectly ordinary thing to happen to a chap, that had Mike telling him the whole story.

"The worst of it is, I was only chaffing the fellow and he knew it," finished Mike. "We were on perfectly decent terms. But ever since then he's been going around telling everyone I went for to do it, and that I'd had it in for him from the beginning. Dash it, I wasn't to know I had beastly fire magic lurking in me. None of my brothers had it, or my father, or grandfather even."

Psmith had been gazing dreamily at the ceiling as Mike told his tale, nodding approvingly at the exciting parts.

"It runs in the matrilineal line," he said.

"The dickens it does! My mater hasn't a magical bone in her body," said Mike.

"An intelligent point, Watson, yet ultimately irrelevant. What you do not know is that magic runs in the blood, so it is no great odds if no traces are to be detected in the bone," said Psmith. "Doubtless your mother, while rocking Jackson the babe, occasionally warmed the milk bottle over a mystical flame, and added interest to her nightly performance of that sell-out number, 'Rockabye Baby', with an impromptu lightshow. Who knows what eldritch creatures attended upon the infant Jackson in his cradle when his parent's hands were occupied in writing her next incisive speech for the Women's Institute?

"But let us leave this subject. A gentleman should never seek to pry into the mysteries of the fairer sex," said Psmith. "At any rate, I expect it would have been jolly hot for her if anyone else had known."

Mike had fallen silent. Till then it had not occurred to him to question where his magic had come from. Everybody did know that such things sometimes happened, though nobody expected it to happen to him. Chaps woke up to find their beds floating in a flood of their own creation, or accidentally caused landslides with an impatient gesture. He had not ever heard that one inherited magic from one's mother. The thought shocked him. Women did not do magic. They were one's mother, or sisters, or even wives if you were keen on that sort of thing (Mike as yet found girls completely uninteresting), but they did not _do_ things.

He was about to ask where Psmith had got this wild idea from when Psmith said contemplatively,

"And hence you see us, in the most putrid school of all putrid schools in our fair land. Numbers, Comrade Jackson. That is what we lack. I ask you, if you will, to imagine a group of a hundred boys. You will find, upon inspecting these boys, that perhaps eighty of them are utter weeds, so troll-like that any parent with an interest in the future of the human race should have bunged them in a sack with a couple of rocks and struck out for the nearest pond before they had begun to learn to speak (if you can call it that). Fifteen of the lads will have the light of something closely approaching intelligence in their eye, but some fatal flaw will mar them -- unfortunate hair, perhaps, or a habit of tapping out Beethoven's Fifth whenever given a flat surface. Four of them will be decent enough chaps, and one -- one, if you are lucky, will be the best of men, precisely the sort of fellow you would want in your club.

"Now numbers," said Psmith, "is what you need. Sedleigh is the home of the male magician, the sorcerer, the wizard. Sedleigh therefore lacks numbers. So I must warn you, Comrade Jackson, that kindred spirits do not abound. It has been a sad desert in recent years to one who craves companionship. I am a man of few words, Comrade Jackson, but my principles demand that those words be withheld from footling fatheads, and unfortunately we abound in fatheads of the footling variety."

Mike was fully in agreement with Psmith, though he might have used slightly less warm language. The fellow might jaw rather, but Psmith seemed to have his head on straight. At least with a chap who thought Sedleigh as rotten as Mike did on side, things might not be so bad. When Psmith said, therefore,

"I don't mind telling you that the stern nobility of your countenance inspires trust in me. Let us be associates."

Mike replied,

"Right-ho."

Psmith steepled his fingers.

"It is well," he intoned. "A fellow named Simpson held title to a study of large-ish proportions, light, airy and pleasant, on the first floor. Simpson, alas, is no longer with us. His loss shall be our gain. I should not presume to direct your actions, but if you did feel tempted to investigate the first floor, it mightn't be a scaly idea to occupy the departed's room -- it's the first door on the left. And if you were to join the Astrological Society, Outwood would be beating aside all comers to take you to his breast -- he loves the association as if 'twere his own child. The society's activities afford the enterprising excellent opportunities to go out of bounds -- school trips on the astral plane, chats with constellations, that sort of thing. And Outwood is not a half bad chap for a master. He is least observant where he is most fond."

Mike was impressed.

"I say, you are the most useful chap," he said. "Speaking of this Outwood, I don't suppose you've any idea where he is? I've been waiting for him ruddy ages now."

Psmith's long, melancholy face took on an attentive aspect.

"An end to your suspense comes, Comrade Jackson," he said. "I believe I hear him now." He got up.

"Business calls me away," said Psmith. "But you will do me a favour, Comrade Jackson? Excellent. I knew you were a man to rely on. Will you be so kind as to pass him this?" Psmith took something out a pocket and threw it to Mike, who caught it neatly. It was his eyeglass.

"Outwood will understand its significance," said Psmith. "Au revoir, Comrade Jackson. Dry your tears. We shall be reunited soon."

"All right," said Mike amiably.

Psmith had scarcely eeled from the room when Outwood turned up. As Psmith had said, he was a kindly-looking soul, and Mike accepted his apologies for his lateness with a better grace than he had thought he would.

"I really am terribly sorry," said Outwood. "The school has been in upheaval. They say the school dragon has been seen on the grounds."

Mike thought wistfully of Wrykyn. School policy at Wrykyn had been to be sceptical about magical creatures. Of course everyone knew they existed, but the official reasoning was that there was no need to _encourage_ them.

At a magicians' school, of course, things would be different. Mike said with an attempt at interest,

"The school dragon?"

"It's not quite accurate to call it that, of course," Outwood admitted. "It hasn't chosen a boy from the school for bonding in years. But it has always been at Sedleigh, even before the school was set up here, so we have come to think of it as our own. I'm afraid it doesn't always agree -- you know what dragons are like, contrary beasts -- it has preferred to keep itself to itself in recent years. A disappointment for our boys, but after all most wizards lead useful lives even if they haven't the luck to be bonded to a dragon. Nevertheless it is quite an event to see our dragon around the school, quite an event."

Mike was finding it difficult to sustain a conversation about a dragon when there were such pressing matters to be discussed as Simpson's study. Fortunately he was saved from an inane remark on the discomfort for the dragon of having to negotiate the narrow school corridors by the recollection of the task Psmith had entrusted to him.

"Oh, sir," he said. "Psmith was just by, he asked me to pass you this." Mike held out the eyeglass. Outwood had started at the name, and now, gazing at the eyeglass, he turned pale.

"Psmith?" he said. "Psmith, did you say? He was here?"

"Yes," said Mike. "I suppose he wanted to speak to you, but only found me. Sir?"

Outwood had taken off his spectacles and sat down. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.

"My dear boy," he said. "It was certainly you he wished to speak with. What a day! I shall remember it all my life. He handed you the glass in my study?"

The good humour Mike had been in after his chat with Psmith was rapidly draining from him in the face of such incomprehensibility. This, he thought, would never have happened at Wrykyn. Masters had made an effort to speak sensibly there. If they wanted you to work on your club, they told you so, in so many words. If it was your skills on the morningstar they wished you to improve instead, why, that is what they said. They did not speak in riddles, or reel in emotion when told of the visit of any mere boy.

This was the point at which the truth began to dawn on Mike.

"Yes, he did," said Mike. "Sir ... we do mean 'he'?"

"One says 'it' out of respect, but Psmith is male, in fact," said Outwood. "It has been years -- 104 years! He appeared in his human form, did he not? My dear boy -- Jackson is the name, is it not -- my dear Jackson, on your very first day! To think that he knew!"

"_Psmith_ is the dragon?" said Mike.

"My dear Jackson, look through the glass," said Outwood. "Not at me, my boy. At yourself!"

Mike did not know what he expected when he raised the eyeglass and looked through it at his own hand, but it certainly was not what he saw. He clenched a fist, then stretched his fingers. Through the glass, muscles flexed underneath obsidian scales. The five talons on the end of his hand gleamed like steel.

"Psmith is a dragon," said Mike faintly.

"And now, so are you," said Outwood.


End file.
